


Like Ships Passing in the Night, As It Were

by dramaturgicallycorrect



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Overdosing, Post-Reichenbach, Rehabilitation, St. Bart's, you know the drill one of those sherlock-and-john-see-each-other-for-the-first-time things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-24
Updated: 2013-08-24
Packaged: 2017-12-24 11:50:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/939679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dramaturgicallycorrect/pseuds/dramaturgicallycorrect
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After spending a year failing to cope with the fact that life as he knew it was over, Sherlock Holmes battles his demon and loses. After spending a year coping with the loss of his best friend, John Watson is shocked to find an overdosed, unconscious Sherlock Holmes in his ER. He must make the difficult decision to reconnect with Sherlock once he regains consciousnessness or continue his life as though he was still dead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like Ships Passing in the Night, As It Were

Fifty-nine days after, he showed up. Then he never left.

Today he was leaned against the wall. His face was twisted into an expression of utter disappointment, a reflection of one of the last expressions he had ever made on this earth. He said nothing. Silently, he watched as Sherlock Holmes exhaled and stretched back into his chair.

Sherlock flexed his fingers, crunching them in and out of a fist. He glanced up at his guest for the first time. As per usual, he said nothing. So the two sat in stubborn silence that stifled the room for an uncomfortable length of time.

“ _Boring_ ,” intoned Moriarty as he gracefully swooped away from the wall and collapsed dramatically to the floor.

Sherlock squeezed his eyes shut and refused to open them.

“You cannot lock the gateway into your soul by simply shutting your eyes. I am already inside you. And yes, that pun was intentional.”

Sherlock had nothing to say on the subject of souls or puns or James Moriarty. For once in his life. He had nothing to say.

“There’s nothing left for you but the fog. You would let your mind rot in punishment for your sins. Apathy is the greater crime for people such as us.”

Sherlock knew what he was experiencing wasn’t real and wasn’t rational. His brain used to find stimulation through the clarities in his highs until he was the recipient of his unwelcome visitor. Moriarty lived—well, not exactly—to torture him, to remove whatever he had left to live for.

He had sacrificed everything to live a non-life. He was no longer Sherlock Holmes because Sherlock Holmes was no longer. The name was never as important as the man. But even the man must be gone.

He couldn’t risk reaching out to anyone. He was never sure whether the fact that he couldn’t reach out or that he wanted and needed to reach out was more of a bother to him.

His escape was tainted by the presence of Moriarty. He opened his eyes but refused to look at the specter.

“That’s right. _I own you_ ,” Moriarty snarled, his face uncomfortably close to Sherlock’s.

Sherlock turned back to his distraction and performed his task swiftly. His body soaked up his release as he pushed more and more than he had ever put into his bloodstream. But it didn’t feel right this time. He wasn’t sure whether he wanted to fight it either.

“I’m so proud of you,” Moriarty said, with a smile while straightening up.

Sherlock felt lighter than he ever had before. He very nearly smiled. Nearly. He went again. Maybe today he could feel nothing at all. Definitely this time he could feel nothing at all.

A pounding came on his door, but Sherlock couldn’t be bothered to answer it. He couldn’t be bothered to move. He wasn’t sure he knew how.

Moriarty’s eyes flicked to the door. “I don’t like to share.”

“Open the fucking door, Altamont,” shouted Sherlock’s landlord through the door. Sherlock suspected being two months behind on the rent had something to do with it. “Open the door or I’m going to knock it the fuck down.”

Sherlock attempted to stand but his legs gave way. The ground was a lot closer than he imagined it was. At that point nothing was clear to him.

At some point the door swung open and the landlord said, “Oh fucking hell.” He leaned over the prone body of his tenant but did nothing. “Fucking hell.”

Moriarty knelt down to Sherlock’s level and looked in his glassy eyes. “It was a pleasure, 4my friend. Your light dims. Your work, your toil, your cunning plan has been for nothing. I’ve won. I want you to know in your final moments that I’ve won,” he very possibly said.

Meanwhile the landlord rang for an ambulance. And the rest was black for Sherlock Holmes.

\--

John Watson found his calling at St. Bart’s, in the busiest Emergency Room in London. Where life and death played out in front of his very eyes. Everything by definition was an emergency, full of stress and snap decisions and high alert.

It felt like home. As close to any home as he had tried for in the last year.

John kept his nose down, worked consistently and responsibly; more so than he ever had been able to in his moonlighting days. He had no aspirations other than living through the day. He didn’t engage because he had forgotten how to. Nobody else in the ER seemed to mind.

An ambulance crew came in through the doors, shouting at him the situation. He knew what he had to do and began to prepare for the care he needed to administer for an overdose beyond what the paramedics had already done. The patient was at this point awake, they said, but fairly incoherent. They had gotten to him quickly, but the drive to the hospital was longer than they cared for.

John was in the middle of his preparation when he glanced for a second down at the patient’s face. Then he froze. He was literally immovable, though he was usually so quick to react and act.

“Dr. Watson,” a nurse or two might have called to him, to no avail.

A nurse handed him his clipboard as he came out of it; he hadn’t remembered dropping it. “Dr. Watson, are you all right?”

John leaned over the patient. His hand hovered over the patient’s face but he couldn’t bring himself to touch it. The entire ER might have heard the sound of his heart pounding.

“No,” he said, but to the patient and not to the nurse.

“Dr. Watson,” the nurse said, with a hand on his arm. “The patient—”

John recoiled his hand as the patient opened his eyes at John. The patient blinked, trying to push his eyes in focus. John turned to the nurse and continued to work. The work. The work came first.

So he did the work on the patient and on the rest of his patients for the end of the shift. He checked back in with the patient more often than necessary, just to check that the patient’s face hadn’t changed. Just to check that he hadn’t imagined the whole thing.

“Diana, tell me, what does that man look like?” John asked the nurse at one point in the night. “Just describe him to me.”

“I dunno. Sharp? Cheekbones. Pouty lips. Dark curly hair,” Diana answered and then took a proper look at his sleeping form. “Honestly he looks a bit like that man from the papers last year, that hoax thing with the crimes—” She stopped herself suddenly. “Sorry I shouldn’t have mentioned. They told us not to mention—I’m just going to.” She walked quickly away from John.

John glazed over the part ‘they told us not to mention’ because he had confirmation. Sherlock Holmes had quite unceremoniously found himself in John Watson’s emergency room.

\--

There were brief moments where he felt nothing at all. But it wasn’t the good nothing either. It was the nothing that lived between vomiting, between sweat drenches, between mind splitting headaches. All hours he spent in misery, but he was never sure these moments of nothing were any kind of respite.

There was no stimulation to be found in his sterile room with his sterile clothing and sterile attending physicians. Not that it mattered, because he was hardly conscious.

The only relief was the absence of his tormentor James Moriarty. He hadn’t won after all. But Sherlock wasn’t sure if Moriarty’s loss was really the best outcome for him. He couldn’t imagine a world that could succeed without him. On the other hand, a world where he lived in a self-imposed exile, where he could receive no puzzles, no reason for living…

He never believed he could experience withdrawal, not as the master of his mind and body. His doctors felt different.

The lecture came pretty immediately from a somewhat anonymous looking doctor. A nearly fatal dose of cocaine, loaded on top of an impossible amount of nicotine patches, on top of black market sleeping pills, on top of little to no food, on top of little to no sleep, on top of his world ending as he knew it.

Sherlock Holmes didn’t care. He couldn’t. His throat ran dry, his voice refused to give sound. A doctor sat a cup and straw on his table and told him to drink up. He did nothing of the sort.

\--

John was not entirely certain St. Bart’s had a rehabilitation section before then. He would take short trips while his patient slept. It took all the strength he had not to shake Sherlock Holmes awake in order for him to feel the sensation of being strangled to death.

He had bounced around between betrayal and relief when he sat in the chair in the corner and watched the fevered shakes of the man who was his best friend. Once John had made a secret wish to see Sherlock Holmes return to life. But now having received his wish, he experienced mostly anger.The closest he had gotten to acknowledging his patient was bringing him a cup of water.

He tried not to be haunted by the last time he saw his patient's face, but who really succeeds in trying not to be haunted. He was so mad. He was so mad. It was days before they released the information that James Moriarty lay dead on the roof that day. He had wanted so hard to believe that he wasn't there just to be a witness. That his patient's last act on this earth wasn't one of macabre selfishness, but somehow connected to Moriarty. Even then, he had hated being a witness. As much as Sherlock Holmes denied he needed people, he always seemed to require an audience.

He always retreated to the doctors’ break room on his floor. Today he had not seen Sherlock. He couldn’t decide whether he should. He hadn’t been in two days. He ignored his dinner in favor of staring at the same five words in the newspaper. He always pretended to read so he didn’t have to talk. But he knew deep down he craved some sort of social interaction, otherwise he wouldn’t sit himself in the public break room.

“John,” said the soft voice of Molly Hooper.

“Oh, god, Molly,” John said, pulling out of his reverie with difficulty. He stood and kissed her cheek. “How are you?” He gestured to the seat next to him and sat himself after she was comfortable.

“I’m doing okay. Day-to-day, you know?” She smiled lightly.

“That’s great. I’m sorry I don’t get down to you very often.”

“I understand. I see you sometimes and that’s nice. It’s quite depressing down there. What with all the memories.” Suddenly she looked stricken. “I mean the dead bodies. Dead bodies.” She frowned into her hands for having hinted at the existence of Sherlock Holmes.

John shook his head in an effort to console her. “I’m sorry.”

“Are you okay, John?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

Molly paused and looked at him. “It’s just. I know you’re sad. You have every reason to be. You shouldn’t let anyone take that from you.”

John let out an uncomfortable laugh and scrunched his face into a confused frown. Before he could protest, Molly said, quickly, quietly, and somewhat rehearsed, “You don’t have to give yourself permission to find little patches of happiness. You’re allowed that. Even if you’re sad, you can find moments that remind you the world can be bright. You can just collect up those moments and file them away to upgrade your sadness to a level closer to happiness.”

She stood up and kissed the top of his head hesitantly before exiting. And John stood up; he was sure what he needed to do.

\--

Sherlock Holmes wrapped his hospital blanket close to him as he waited for a taxi at the front of St. Bart’s. He was exhausted physically and intellectually from his detoxing and testing regiment. He checked himself out of the hospital as soon as he could. Well, he wasn’t supposed to have checked out quite yet before his drug rehabilitation consultation meeting. Referrals to other institutions meant a more thorough background check. He had skirted by for as long as he could under his alias John Altamont.

He wished he could pretend this experience had some great impact on his life or outlook. He briefly flirted with the idea of starting over in another country that had no knowledge of Sherlock Holmes. He could start the game up again.

John Watson ran from the elevator to the front doors of St. Bart’s, where Sherlock Holmes stood waiting for his taxi. He stood and watched him, but remained unmoved. He wished he could pretend this experience would make it any easier for him to confront how damaged his relationship with Sherlock Holmes had made him.

“Patient Altamont please return to the rehabilitation ward; patient John Altamont to the rehabilitation ward,” said a voice over the loud speaker. Soon the security personnel would begin their search for the missing patient.

John stared at the thin, practically withered human who stood on the other side of St. Bart’s doors. He couldn’t walk forward. He couldn’t call out. Couldn’t or wouldn’t?

Sherlock Holmes disappeared, as quickly as he appeared, out into the anonymous masses that composed the population of London. John Watson wasn’t sad to see him go. He could feel himself forcing the book of his life with Sherlock Holmes closed. He believed in Sherlock Holmes, and Sherlock Holmes had delivered on John’s wish. John Watson turned away from the doors and headed back to work. That was a patch of brightness, knowing Sherlock Holmes was still in the world, even if John couldn’t do much more than pass unknown in and out of his life once more.


End file.
